today we have a surfeit of knowledge and methods as far as structures are concerned, and
we are impoverished as soon as we have to study operations, transformations, in short,
movement.

Michel de Certeau, Culture in the Plural, 1974, p. 145

This chapter is impressionistic and collage-like. It is an effort to study the culture
of an Olympic legacy, an Olympic sport and a community of people. It represents
a sporting space and sporting lives. With the collage-like presentation, I am
attempting to expose and analyse the richness of cultural life in a highly defined
(some might say rarified) sporting space. It is a synthesis of images, memories,
emotions, characters and theoretical considerations that have converged and
diverged over a period of two years at a post Olympic Games speed skating facility.
During this two-year period, the pattern of my everyday life intersected with
the everyday lives of speed skaters at Calgary's Olympic Oval on the campus
of the University of Calgary. My experiences and the production of this text is
a response to the ideas of Michel de Certeau and other critical thinkers for whom
the patterns of everyday life are a source of knowledge about human agency
and social and cultural institutions. This text integrates facts, inventories and
definitions with theoretical propositions and anecdotes. It attempts to illustrate
the ways Olympic Games, Olympism and Olympic legacies can impact the
daily lives of human beings. I have organized these impressions and reflections
into four sections: the space, the sport, the skaters and the ‘Olympians amongst
us’.

The prefix ‘post’ evokes sentiments that range from optimism to pessimism,
playfulness to anxiety. It implies a paradigmatic shift away from the clear and

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